PASADENA, Calif. — First of all, Bates Motel is not your grandfather’s Psycho, the new, updated series’ makers want you to know.

This filmed-in-Vancouver version of the infamous Norman Bates tale is part prequel, part sequel, updated to modern time but going back in time to speculate about what the young Norman Bates must have been like as a young teenager, and how he became the swell guy he turned into as an adult.

Secondly, when making a spooky horror story set in 2013, the Universal back lot may be fine and dandy for tourist trams and Hitchcock purists, but if you want a really atmospheric setting and that creeping sense of dread that only a grungy motel surrounded by evergreens smothered in a perpetual mist of fog, sleet and rain, well, it’s hard to top Vancouver for sheer misery.

Bates Motel hails from Lost co-executive producer Carlton Cuse and Friday Night Lights writer-producer Kerry Ehrin, and features an eclectic international cast that includes 20-year-old London, England, ingénue Freddie Highmore as the 15-year-old Norman Bates and Ukraine-descended indie film actress Vera Farmiga as the intelligent, ravishingly beautiful but ill-fated Norma Louise Bates.

Bates Motel debuts in March on A&E, but many of the early episodes have already been filmed. The production wraps at the end of the month [Jan. 24] under producers Justis Greene and Tucker Gates, working with Emmy Award winning cinematographer John Bartley, formerly of The X-Files, and Tom Yatsko.

Bates Motel may take a lot of liberties with the original story — “The idea of an homage was just not that interesting to me,” Cuse said at the winter meeting of the TV Critics Association — but that doesn’t mean it will end with Norma Bates living happily ever after.

“Making that fundamental decision to make the story contemporary gave us the freedom to take these characters wherever we wanted to,” Cuse explained. “There’s a certain amount of baggage, obviously, that comes with working within the Psycho universe. I really think, though, that setting it up this way gave us the licence as storytellers to tell a really interesting, character-driven psychological thriller. Making it contemporary liberated us from the original movie.”

Cuse also dashed cold water over fanboys’ expectations that, because of his association with Lost, Bates Motel< might become Lost by any other name.

“No polar bears,” he said simply. “No smoke monsters, okay? Just saying that right off the top. Time travel — I don’t know. No, there are no supernatural elements in play here. This is…”

“Grounded,” Ehrin finished for him.

During her years on Friday Night Lights, Ehrin developed an ear for the way teenagers think and talk — real teenagers, not TV archetypes. If anything, Bates Motel will have more in common with The Killing than with the original Psycho.

Vancouver became a character in the series in its own way, and still is, Ehrin said.

Farmiga and Highmore, two actors of widely varying ages and from wildly different cultural backgrounds, concurred.

“The original story was set in northern California, but we wanted that unique feel that Vancouver brings,” Ehrin said. “The talent pool is amazing, for one thing. Our line producer, Justis Greene, has been just amazing. The city has actually brought a lot to it.”

“It rains the whole time,” Highmore said. “But it’s quite nice for the show, in a way, because it gives you a nice dark, moody quality.

“The first scene, when we arrive at the motel, it’s all sunny and you think everything’s going to be great. And then the rain arrives, and it’s not going to be great.”

Ehrin recently took the back-lot tram tour at Universal Studios in Burbank, Calif, where the original Psycho house still looms large on a hill overlooking the Jaws shark pond.

“It’s still iconic,” Ehrin said of the original Psycho house. “It’s very cool. That’s why it’s still there. They made that movie a long time ago, but people still like to go by it because it’s evocative and disturbing.”

The Vancouver design crew, under location manager Abraham Fraser and production designer Mark Freeborn, tapped their inner Hitchock in trying to outdo the original, Cuse added.

“It’s kind of awesome that we managed to rebuild the motel and the house in Vancouver,” Cuse said. “It’s on this road that goes to one of the public dumps. People drive down this road all the time. You see them and all of a sudden the brakes come on. It’s like, ‘Whaaat?’

“The big Bates Motel sign being right there, and the house on the hill — it’s pretty funky. That was an element we wanted to preserve from the original. It’s such an iconic image. Even if the storytelling is contemporary and, I like to think, somewhat original, we wanted to maintain the iconographic quality of that motel and house.”

Highmore, for his his part, has never been to the Universal lot, or seen the original Psycho house.

“Maybe now,” he said simply, with a wan smile.

Farmiga hails from an artistic family — her younger sister Taissa played suicidal teen Violet Harmon in American Horror Story — and she’s well-versed in her Hitchcock lore.

“Our production designer, Mark Freeborn — he also does Breaking Bad — went back and got the original plans from Universal that Hitchcock himself used for the construction of the motel, and the staircase, and the house," Cuse said. "We reconstituted everything. That was a really fun part of the process, to go back into the archives and take a really hard look at the history of the property.”

Ehrin admitted the story — with its intimations of dark obsessions and sexual violence — required a delicate balance, especially in these violent times when popular culture is coming under increased scrutiny.

“The basis of Norma and Norman’s relations is Oedipal and, obviously, that’s a dark subject,” she said, immersed in thought. “I think once you create an emotional landscape where you delve into that kind of story material, while at the same time you’re trying to keep it grounded and real, you're bound to end up with all these people who are harbouring dark secrets, where there's this sense of fear and dread.

“I do think, though, that the way we've portrayed it in the story is that this is something that’s horrible and it shouldn’t happen. At least, I hope that’s the spirit in which people will watch it.”

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile